Getting A Grip On Stress With Chief PeaceKeeper & Jan Cerasaro

Hey everybody, this is Scott Levin, Chief Peacekeeper, and I am here with an awesome guest today that you guys are going to love. Her name is Jan Serracero. She happens to be my stress reduction coach, and I want you to learn a little bit more about her because I think she should be all of our stress reduction coaches. Uh, she's a truly talented, amazing person. We're going to have a real quick conversation now, but hopefully there'll be more to, to come. So, Jan, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for inviting me, Scott. I always love working with you, working with you and working with you.

Absolutely. So now that I've talked Jan's ear off for the last hour, we can start the recording. I got it all out of my system. So, Jan, I guess one of the first things I wanted to just ask you is, What is the impact on someone's health of carrying a lot of stress on a day-to-day basis?

I mean, it's huge. You know, a lot of times people think, oh, my shoulders are tight, you know, I got tightness in my back, no big deal. You know, I can get a massage or take a warm shower or something like that. But maybe you've heard of the analogy from a cardiologist of people having heart attacks and, and, you know, eating a lot of cheeseburgers. And if you had One cheeseburger and that caused a heart attack, you probably wouldn't eat cheeseburgers. Well, stress is kind of like that because it's very gradual. And just like in your business dealing with divorce issues and things, when people get into a relationship, they're not going into a bad relationship. They're going into something that's nice. And each day things change, and sometimes things change A little bit for the worse each day. And it's the same way with stress because you don't come, you know, you don't hire into a job and say, hey, I want to work 14-hour days, 6 days a week, not be able to see my family and things like that, you know. And, and so it's just, it's a gradual progression. Well, what happens then is we think it's just the shoulders. We think it's just the back. We think maybe it's the indigestion, but what's really happening under— underneath all of that is you're developing a lot of cortisol. Your body is making lots of cortisol. That's why a lot of times people that are under a lot of stress gain weight. It kind of wipes out your libido. So if you do have any time to be with your other half or significant other, you may not really want to be with them.

Yep, interesting.

If you're looking for the fountain of youth, you definitely want to reduce your stress because it ages people's bodies. And so all of these things are happening so gradually, and that doesn't even count for the, um, the reduction in your immune system. And with COVID out there right now, we all need our immune systems to be as strong as they can be. But if you're under a lot of stress, that's not going to be happening.

So we all know that we, like, you know, you look at the studies, Ameri— you know, Americans in particular work longer, uh, work harder, are less happy than we were, you know, the decade before, the decade before that, etc. So we know that stress is a part of our daily lives. We live with it. So how does helping—

how—

explain to the people how you help me How does a coach like yourself reduce someone's stress and improve their lifestyle?

Well, you know, in coaching the client like yourself, you actually are the one that has to do the work. I can't do that for you. But let's kind of just off the top use an analogy of football. Now, the football coach isn't running the plays, but he's maybe working with the quarterback. He's watching him. They're getting together. He's, he's talking about, okay, you know, maybe kind of adjust yourself, move this way, do this a little bit. And, and they do a lot of brainstorming. Watch to see how they're refining and making changes. Well, when you're dealing with someone like myself, when you're in a lot of stress, you only know that you're in a lot of stress. You maybe have forgotten what you want your life to really look like, or you're so tired you haven't given it any thought. And so one of the first things I do is get together with my client to find out what is it that you want your life to be. If, if you had a magic wand and time and money wasn't a concern, what would you want it to be? How committed are you to actually having that, because it is possible to make those changes. And then we start coming up with a plan as to actually how to create those changes. So can I get them to walk out of the office a little bit earlier each day? Probably eventually. I mean, they have to actually walk out the door. But, you know, we, we work together so that someone can Reprioritize their life. Because just like when you're on the verge of ending a bad relationship, all of a sudden you start becoming aware that things really aren't the way you want them to be. And that's exactly what I deal with, with my clients, because, you know, they've, they've kind of gotten so stuck in a cycle they don't even know how to get out of it. And working with me, they're not doing it alone, you know, so they have access to me during the week in between sessions. And, you know, we get a chance to look at what habit changes they might need to make. Then I can help hold them accountable for, are you actually taking steps to do that? Because sometimes that's a big, a big part of what you need. You've got to have somebody Kind of holding your— not feet to the fire, really, but holding you accountable. I have my own coach, and she does the same with me.

So, no, I love that. I love that analogy to coaching too. I often use it in mediation— that, uh, uh, off topic, but, uh, you know, when I explain to people, in my opinion, that most people can divorce or separate, uh, you know, with keeping them as the coach or the quarterback They're in control of their own outcome and they need to engage professionals in mediation and legal counsel and financial experts. They need to build that team and stress reduction, of course, and even maybe mental health professionals, et cetera. But they need to be in charge of that process, not just handing over their life to an attorney that they just met who's promising them X, Y, and Z. And then that attorney takes over and they're like, well, I don't really know what— What I signed or what's going on. You need to be in charge. One question I had is, do you think that— is there a difference between personal life stress and work-life stress, or does it all just go into one bucket?

Well, in some respects it goes into one bucket because stress— first off, we have to have stress. It's necessary. The stress that you and I are talking about is distress, which causes disease. But we have to have stress. I mean, making love is stressful, but I don't think anybody's going to give it up because it's— And, and moving, you know, moving actually stresses the body, but we just don't think about it that way. Like, stubbing your toe is really a failure, but we don't consider ourselves failures because we stubbed our toes, you know. So with stress, it's, it's really a lot of— it's really self-induced. Okay.

Also from ourselves. It's internal.

Well, you know, it's self-induced because it's a matter of perspective. You know, how are you looking at something? Are you looking at something as, as a negative and making it bad? Or are you looking at the same thing And seeing that it's a positive. Like if it's at work, you know, you've got stacks of files electronically or physically, and do you look at that as, hey, this is great, I have a lot of business, or, you know, I don't know how I'm going to get through this, I don't think I can handle it all, and then, you know, expecting that you need to get it all done in one day. And, and so a lot of the stress is generated by ourselves, which is good news and bad news. The bad news is it's created by ourselves, and the good news is because it is created by ourselves, we can get rid of it, you know. And it takes time. So I mean, like, in my programs, I have a 3-month and a 6-month program because it takes time to be able to gradually make those changes so that they stick.

Well, I, I think that the work you do is amazing. I, I can testify from it personally, and, uh, Jan, I know we're going to wrap up. We're running again. I know I spoke too long off camera to you, so I know you have to run. But good news is that we are going to have these conversations coming online continually.

Yeah.

I think that Jan is such a good speaker about— and what she offers affects us all, you know, lawyers, stay-at-home moms, people with a lot of money, people with a little money. So Jan is your stress reduction coach. She mans the fire hose. I'll let you finish it, Jan.

Oh, I man the fire hose when you're close to burnout.